Defending America is a number one responsibility and money’s not the first consideration. The first consideration is winning….

But we have always, one way or the other, raised the money to defend America, and in this case to defend America from a different kind of war, the war on terrorism. And it will be done.

He’s right on one account. You fight a war because you must, and the budget concerns should be immaterial. But the original question was, effectively, “Why aren’t lawmakers willing to ask Americans to pay for the costs of protecting the homeland, either through tax hikes or spending cuts elsewhere in the government?”

Grassley ducked it, and his argument that Congress has “always … raised the money to defend America” ignores the truth that, since 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded primarily by borrowing from abroad — a particularly curious whitewash in the context of Republican criticisms that health care reform will break the federal budget.

The costs of that failure to ask for shared sacrifice have been tangible. When George W. Bush was elected to the White House in 2000, the nation’s debt was $5.7 trillion. Eight years later — after several rounds of tax cuts and two unfunded wars — the number had jumped to $10.0 trillion.

It’s worth noting that most of the Republicans now criticizing the costs of health care reform, Grassley included, also supported those mid-war tax cuts.

Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze the future effects of the Democrats’ tax increase. Specifically, Grassley is wondering why the proposed hike isn’t indexed to inflation, leaving more and more Americans to fall subject to the increase each year.

“The unintended consequences could be significant,” Grassley warned.

If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the Alternative Minimum Tax — designed decades ago to target just a tiny sliver of high-income households — was similarly not indexed to inflation. As incomes have risen over the years, more and more upper-middle-class families have fallen into the bracket under which they have to pay the AMT. Some liberals don’t see a problem with that. But Congress, fearing a backlash at the polls, has stepped in each year with the so-called AMT patch, providing billions of (borrowed) dollars to prevent the tax from hitting those families.

The Democrats’ motivations are easy to surmise: Had they indexed the tax to inflation they would have generated much less revenue to pay for their health-care reform bill. And the proposed payroll tax increase is much less than the AMT. Still, it’s not too far a stretch to imagine that the lawmakers of the 2030s, also wanting to appease the voters, would also find it tempting to come up with the Medicare-payroll patch.

Under the proposed 50/50 formula, utilities that are more coal dependent will need to purchase even more allowances than they would have if all allowances were allocated based on emissions.

Well, yeah. And under the current proposed 50/50 formula, the coal burners would also have to purchase more allowances than if Congress did nothing at all. But the whole point of the bill is to discourage the use of high-emission energies like coal by making them less affordable than cleaner alternatives. Sheppard explains further why the lawmakers’ argument makes little sense in the context of the global warming debate:

Of course, this would work against the entire logic of the proposed scheme, which is to offer utilities financial incentives to switch to lower-carbon fuel sources. [...]

Right now, the climate bill needs all the votes it can get from Democrats. So enviros worry that concessions to this bloc could ultimately result in a deal in which coal plants suffer no real penalties for the carbon they pump into the atmosphere. “Dirty coal polluters know their days are numbered and are lobbying for the largest piece of the pie they can get,” said Jason Kowalski, policy coordinator at 1Sky. “It goes against the spirit of this legislation to reward the polluters that caused this problem in the first place.”

Signing on to the letter were Democratic Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Al Franken (Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Roland Burris (Ill.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Robert Byrd (W.Va.).

There isn’t anything wrong with it, except some people look at it as an infringement upon individual freedom. But when it comes to states requiring it for automobile insurance, the principle then ought to lie the same way for health insurance, because everybody has some health insurance costs, and if you aren’t insured, there’s no free lunch. Somebody else is paying for it…. I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates.

And here’s Grassley today, raising questions about the constitutionality of those individual mandates:

For the first time in a 225- year history of the country, the federal government says you have to buy something, and if you don’t buy it, you’re going to be paying $1,500 as a family to the IRS each time you file your income tax until you get at least a minimum insurance….

And the questions raised about that — and, of course, I’m not a constitutional lawyer and I don’t — haven’t studied the law. In fact, I doubt if there’s any cases that would apply to it right now that you could call precedent…. [But] you want to assume that Congress would not pass an unconstitutional law if they knew it was unconstitutional.

When a reporter asked specifically about the difference between a federal health insurance mandate and a state car insurance mandate, Grassley had a ready answer: the 10th Amendment.

The major difference would be the 10th Amendment and what the 10th Amendment says about our federal system of government. It says something like: anything that’s not specifically delegated to the federal government is reserved to the states and the people thereof — all those rights and powers….

So states, if they want to mandate you buy something, they can do it. But that doesn’t give the federal government the right to do it.

The next question was about $50 million in emergency aid the federal government recently showered on the nation’s pork farmers — half of the assistance Grassley had requested.

“I don’t think it’s a referendum on Obama,” the Republican lawmaker said in a conference call with reporters. “I think it’s a — it’s a referendum on some of his programs — not that his programs are not well-intentioned, but are they working and, in some instances, are they going too far?”

Of course, Republicans fared very well in high-profile statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia, but the GOP’s favored candidates lost both federal special elections in New York’s 23rd Congressional District and California’s 10th. One can only wonder what prominent Republicans would be saying if they had won either or both of those House seats.

One focus of the commission’s review, sponsors say, will necessarily be the sentencing policies surrounding the decades-old “war on drugs,” which critics argue has packed the nation’s prisons needlessly with non-violent offenders.

Some Republicans, however, are wary of taking any steps toward a legalization of drugs. And they’re lining up with amendments to prevent that from happening. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), for example, has been weighing a provision that would prevent the newly formed commission from even studying the effects that drug legalization would have on the criminal justice system.

“The point is, for them to do what we tell them to do,” Grassley said Wednesday of the commission. “And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.”

Asked by a reporter if his amendment would “have even stopped the discussion of legalized marijuana for medical purposes,” Grassley responded, “Yes, the extent to which it would be decriminalization, the answer is yes.”

The Webb-Specter bill has 35 co-sponsors, including Judiciary Committee Republicans Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.).

“[Lieberman] still wants to be a part of the Democratic Party although he is a registered independent. He wants to caucus with us and, of course, he enjoys his chairmanship of the [Homeland Security] committee because of the indulgence of the Democratic Caucus. So, I’m sure all of those things will cross his mind before the final vote.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard a congressional Democrat bring up Lieberman’s chairmanship as something the Connecticut senator might lose if he were to vote against a Democratic health bill.

I don’t think anything that Rush Limbaugh said was offensive, but with Fergie and with J-Lo, they have, between the two of them, alleged that the CIA are terrorists and liars, they’ve promoted sexual abuse of women, they’ve used the N word, verbal pornography, recreational drug use, etc. And they are owners of the Dolphins. And it’s also ironic that Fergie was approved as an owner on the very day that you made your statement on Rush Limbaugh.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the House Judiciary Committee hearing was titled “Legal Issues Related to Football Head Injuries.”

Here’s the video:

From The Minnesota Independent:

“Steve King is mentioned as a potential nominee,” Bachmann said. “I have a very high opinion of Steve King and his ability, so I would encourage him to consider any position for higher office.”

Like Bachmann, King is a very conservative Christian known for stirring controversy with his public statements. He made waves this summer when he opposed a resolution recognizing the role slaves played in building the U.S. Capitol and called hate-crimes legislation “the Pedophile Protection Act.” Our sister site, the Iowa Independent, has continuing coverage of Bachmann’s kindred spirit to the south.